Category: Hurricane Katrina

Guns Deter Crime

 

Knoxville, Tenn.

IT’S a phenomenon that gives the term “gun control” a whole new meaning: community ordinances that encourage citizens to own guns.

Last month, Greenleaf, Idaho, adopted Ordinance 208, calling for its citizens to own guns and keep them ready in their homes in case of emergency. It’s not a response to high crime rates. As The Associated Press reported, “Greenleaf doesn’t really have crime … the most violent offense reported in the past two years was a fist fight.” Rather, it’s a statement about preparedness in the event of an emergency, and an effort to promote a culture of self-reliance.

. . .  

Criminals, unsurprisingly, would rather break into a house where they aren’t at risk of being shot. As David Kopel noted in a 2001 article in The Arizona Law Review, burglars report that they try to avoid homes where armed residents are likely to be present. We see this phenomenon internationally, too, with the United States having a lower proportion of “hot” burglaries — break-ins where the burglars know the home to be occupied — than countries with restrictive gun laws.

Likewise, in the event of disasters that leave law enforcement overwhelmed, armed citizens can play an important role in stanching crime. Armed neighborhood watches deterred looting in parts of Houston and New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

 

For the full commentary, see:

GLENN REYNOLDS.  "A Rifle in Every Pot."  The New York Times  (Tues., January 16, 2007):  A31.

 

Glenn Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee, and is the blogger of Instapundit.com.  In 2006, he published:

Reynolds, Glenn. An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths. Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2006.

 

    Source of book image:  http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/1595550542.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V1136930360_.jpg

 

Needed to Save New Orleans: Less Local Government Corruption and More Local Capitalism

HurricaneKatrinaSpending.gif  Source of graphic:  online version of the WSJ editorial cited below.

 

New Orleans’ plight is not the result of federal underspending.  Uncle Sam has spent some five times more on Katrina relief than any other natural disaster in the past 50 years.  Both parties in Congress and the White House opted for the status quo by relying on federal bureaucracies to oversee the rebuilding effort.  If Uncle Sam were deliberately trying to waste these funds, it is hard to imagine a better way than to funnel the money through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Small Business Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  Both HUD and the SBA have been on the chopping block back to the early Reagan years.

The post-Katrina spend-fest in Louisiana will be remembered as one of the greatest taxpayer wastes in U.S. history.  First came the FEMA $2,000 debit-cards fiasco intended to pay for necessities that were used for things like flat-panel TVs and tattoos.  Then came the purchase of thousands of mobile homes that cost as much as $400,000 per family housed; the $200 million for renting the Carnival Cruise Ship  millions more in payments that went for season football tickets, luxury vacation resorts, even divorce lawyers.  Federal flood insurance policies surely will encourage many to rebuild in the same flood plains and at the same height as before.

. . .

After the hurricane, newspapers around the world showed photos of New Orleans under headlines that shouted:  "America’s shame."  In truth, New Orleans was America’s shame long before Katrina.  In large part the residents of the Big Easy were victims of the predatory behavior of their own politicians.  Louisiana already ranked among the bottom five of all the states in crime, poverty, health care and school performance; the murder rate in New Orleans today is 10 times the national average.

For all the finger-pointing this week, Congress hasn’t spent much more than a dime to clear away the debris of corruption, patronage, welfare dependency, high taxes and racial division of decimated neighborhoods.  What is still lacking in the life of New Orleans is the vital architecture of local capitalism.

 

For the full editorial, see: 

"The Tragedy of New Orleans."  The Wall Street Journal  (Tues., August 29, 2006):  A14.

 

Audacity and Scale of Hurricane Katrina Waste and Fraud Are Amazing

Photo scanned in from my paper copy of the NYT issue cited below.  Compare the version above to the cropped version that appeared in to online version below–whether deliverate or innocent, the effect of the cropping is to reduce the visual magnitude of the scene (and hence reduce the evidence of the magnitude of the waste).

 

(p. A1)  WASHINGTON, June 26 — Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one:  it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion.

A hotel owner in Sugar Land, Tex., has been charged with submitting $232,000 in bills for phantom victims.  And roughly 1,100 prison inmates across the Gulf Coast apparently collected more than $10 million in rental and disaster-relief assistance.

There are the bureaucrats who ordered nearly half a billion dollars worth of mobile homes that are still empty, and renovations for a shelter at a former Alabama Army base that cost about $416,000 per evacuee.

And there is the Illinois woman who tried to collect federal benefits by claiming she watched her two daughters drown in the rising New Orleans waters.  In fact, prosecutors say, the children did not exist.

The tally of ignoble acts linked to Hurricane Katrina, pulled together by The New York Times from government audits, criminal prosecutions and Congressional investigations, could rise because the inquiries are under way.  Even in Washington, a city accustomed to government bloat, the numbers are generating amazement.

"The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, the scale of the waste — it is just breathtaking," said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

 

For the full story, see:

ERIC LIPTON.  "’Breathtaking’ Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid."  The New York Times  (Tues., June 27, 2006):  A1 & A13. 

 

  Cropped version of the photo run in the online version of the NYT article cited above.

Source of the graphic:  the online version of the NYT article cited above.

“a jobs program for people who couldn’t make it in the private sector”

Source of book image:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400065526/sr=8-1/qid=1153368329/ref=sr_1_1/104-2835260-2878345?ie=UTF8

 

The levees are built by the Army Corps of Engineers, with the Orleans Levee District enjoying local control.  It is instructive to learn that the former president of the levee district bought himself an inflatable rubber craft a decade ago.  As Mr. Horne writes, some levees gave way "even before water reached the heights the walls were meant to contain and, in some cases, after it had begun to ebb."

Beset by outsourcing, brain drains and budget cuts, the Army Corps has been skimping for years.  This spring, its commanding officer conceded that there had been problems with flood-wall engineering.  But the government hardly has a monopoly on blame.  As Mr. Horne notes, the corps had intended to build a flood barrier at the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain on the city’s northern border ("an idea that would, after Katrina, suddenly seem like the highest sort of wisdom"), but the plan was scrapped when environmentalists sued.

By the mid-1970s, "the completion date for the upgraded flood defense that Congress had mandated for New Orleans had already been pushed back thirteen years," Mr. Horne writes, and one section was still unfinished as Katrina hit.  Apathy and indifference "turned government work into a jobs program for people who couldn’t make it in the private sector or who couldn’t be bothered to try."

Government handouts of a different sort followed the hurricane:  After a slow start with its relief effort, FEMA helped countless hurricane victims who were truly in need, but the agency also began cutting checks for almost anyone who asked.  "An initial $2000 would turn up in the mail within a few days of registering online or placing a call," Mr. Horne writes.  In fact, the agency "rolled over for millions in fraudulent or duplicate claims without checking to see that the applicant had offered a vacant lot or a nonexistent address as his or her residence."  Perhaps that was easier than risking further accusations of bias.

 

For the full review, see:

TOM BETHELL. "Books; Levying the Blame; Nearly a year after a hurricane ravaged a city and the finger-pointing began, two books dissect the destruction and the government’s response."  The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 15, 2006):  P8.

 

The citation for the Horne book is:

Horne, Jed.  Breach of Faith.  Random House, 2006.  (412 pages, $25.95)

 

Free-Market ‘Chaos’ Versus Planning, in New Orleans

The rebirth of New Orleans does, . . . , require a leap into the unknown. It can’t be meticulously planned. Preserve the old buildings. Rope off the lowlands. But then let imagination takes its course. Unfortunately, Mr. Nagin’s Bring Back New Orleans group is loaded with central planners prescribing a dream city built around such highlights as light-rail transport, a “jazz district” and a neuroscience center. Typical is Michael Cowan, head of the city’s Human Relations Commission, who warned that “the alternative to a ‘good-enough’ plan for the future of our city is free-market chaos, also known . . . as every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.”
Actually, it was precisely this chaos that made New Orleans a great city in the first place. It was planning — specifically, the horrifying housing projects, largely destroyed in Katrina; the stultifying school system; the Superdome and other wasteful public-works projects — that held the city back.

For the full commentary, see:
JAMES K. GLASSMAN. “CROSS COUNTRY; Back to the Future.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., January 12, 2006): A13.

Never Say Die: Milton Friedman on Vouchers, Again

From an opinion-piece by Milton Friedman, at age 93, in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Whatever the promise of vouchers for the education of New Orleans children, the reform will be opposed by the teachers unions and the educational administrators. They now control a monopoly school system. They are determined to preserve that control, and will go to almost any lengths to do so.
Unions to the contrary, the reform would achieve the purposes of Louisiana far better than the present system. The state’s objective is the education of its children, not the construction of buildings or the running of schools. Those are means not ends. The state’s objective would be better served by a competitive educational market than by a government monopoly. Producers of educational services would compete to attract students. Parents, empowered by the voucher, would have a wide range to choose from. As in other industries, such a competitive free market would lead to improvements in quality and reductions in cost.
If, by a political miracle, Louisiana could overcome the opposition of the unions and enact universal vouchers, it would not only serve itself, it would also render a service to the rest of the country by providing a large scale example of what the market can do for education when permitted to operate.

MILTON FRIEDMAN. “The Promise of Vouchers.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., December 5, 2005): A20.

“Treat Me with Benign Neglect.”

Source: Screen capture from CNN “Refusing to Leave” report by Dan Simon on the morning of 9-9-05.

“This is America. Has your neighborhood ever been invaded by state troopers from another state?” “I will leave when I am dead.” Ashton O’Dwyer can’t understand why he is being forced to leave his dry, intact home in New Orleans. He asks the city: “Treat me with benign neglect.” The 9-9-05 report was followed up by Drew Griffin on 9-10-05 with the “Staying Put” report that presented businesses, and Afro-Americans, expressing sentiments similar to O’Dwyer’s.
Dr. Michael Baden on the “On the Record” Fox News show, hosted by Greta Van Susteren at about 9:47 PM central time on 9-9-05, stated that there was little danger from the “toxic” water unless people drink it. (Toxic water is the main reason given for the current, post-hurricane, forced evacuations.) Baden claims if the city wants to help people, they would be much more effective if they sprayed the water against mosquitoes.
(Dr. Michael Baden is the Chief Forensic Pathologist of the New York State Police, and was formerly the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City.)

Watch the CNN report: “Refusing to Leave“:

Watch the CNN report: “Staying Put“:

For more on O’Dwyer, see also:
CHRISTOPHER COOPER. “Old-Line Families Escape Worst of Flood and Plot the Future.” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (September 8, 2005): A1.

Looting New Orleans


“In downtown New Orleans, where looters are floating garbage cans filled with clothing and jewelry down the street.” From an online slideshow of looting at Wal-Mart and Walgreens in New Orleans. Caption for photo, and photo itself, from: http://www.nbc10.com/slideshow/news/4917518/detail.html?qs=;s=4;p=news;dm=ss;w=400 (POSTED: 9:45 pm EDT August 30, 2005; UPDATED: 10:53 am EDT August 31, 2005; Downloaded Sept. 5, 2005)
Harold Andersen reports on the observations of his wife’s cousin, Michael Ross, a member of the faculty of the history department of Loyola University in New Orleans:

When the levees broke and put the major share of New Orleans under water, a substantial portion of the city was still dry because it was on higher ground, above sea level. Included were the French Quarter, some attractive residential neighborhoods and the land on which Loyola University is located.
There was some wind damage in the higher-ground areas of the city, but those areas were basically preserved and could have served as a base from which the city could be rebuilt.
“But they’re gone now, as a result of looting,” Ross told us.
The looting wasn’t random. Organized street gangs, armed with weapons stolen from looted stores, went about looting quickly and systematically, Ross said. In residential areas, they went down streets kicking in the doors of house after house after house, leaving the residences in shambles.
One unforgettable scene, Ross said, was the telecast showing five pickup trucks of gang members leaving a looted Wal-Mart store with dozens of weapons they had stolen.
Ross is pessimistic about the chances that Loyola and Tulane Universities will reopen this fall, even if their campuses are intact. Students, particularly new students, are most likely to be discouraged from attending school in a nearly destroyed city.
On a personal note, Ross expects that the house in which he has been living will be a victim of looting and his computer files are likely to have been destroyed.

Andersen, Harold W. “If New Orleans is Dead Forever, Looters Delivered the Fatal Blow.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, September 4, 2005): 13B. Also online at: http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_pg=609&u_sid=2006986

New Orleans is the opposite of America, and we must hold onto places that are the opposite of us. New Orleans is not fast or energetic or efficient, not a go-get-’em Calvinist well-ordered city. It’s slow, lazy, sleepy, sweaty, hot, wet, lazy and exotic. (p. 9)

Childress, Mark. “Tribute: What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” New York Times, Section 9 (September 4, 2005): 9 & 11.
OK, so then why is it that all us fast, energetic, efficient, go-get-’em Calvinists are responsible for coughing up billions to save a lifestyle we don’t much get to enjoy?